The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
Summary
Maggie Tulliver grows up at Dorlcote Mill on the river Floss, near the fictional town of St Ogg's, quick, passionate, and constantly at odds with the quieter expectations her family has for a girl of her class, most of all with her stolid, dutiful brother Tom, whose approval she craves and rarely gets. When their father loses a ruinous lawsuit and the family's fortunes collapse, Tom leaves school to work and repay the family's debts, growing harder and more rigid in the process, while Maggie's only real companionship comes from Philip Wakem, the sensitive, deformed son of her father's enemy, a friendship Tom forbids outright once he learns of it. Years later, visiting her cousin Lucy Deane, Maggie is drawn into an unplanned and increasingly reckless attraction to Lucy's presumed fiance, Stephen Guest, and an innocent boat trip drifts, through a mix of weather and mutual weakness, into an overnight absence that ruins Maggie's reputation regardless of what did or did not happen between them. She refuses to marry Stephen and returns alone to St Ogg's to face the town's judgment and Tom's furious rejection, and the novel's ending arrives suddenly: a flood sweeps through the town, Maggie rows out to rescue Tom, and the siblings drown together in the flood water, briefly reconciled in the moment before the boat overturns.
Eliot draws heavily on her own childhood in shaping Maggie's story, above all on her bond with and bitter estrangement from her own brother Isaac, who cut her off over her union with George Henry Lewes, and the novel is at its strongest describing how a bright, hungry mind gets steadily narrowed by a world with almost no room for a woman's ambition. The pace is patient through its long middle stretch and the ending, abrupt after so much careful accumulation, has divided readers since it first appeared.
St Ogg's is generally identified with Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, where a plaque records the town as the model for the novel's river town, and the Floss with the Trent that runs through it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Mill on the Floss was published on 4 April 1860 in three volumes by William Blackwood and Sons, with an American edition from Harper and Brothers appearing the same year. The novel's sudden, tragic ending has remained its most argued over feature; later critics including Elizabeth Ermarth have read Maggie's fate as an indictment of a culture that denies her, in Ermarth's words, her full humanity, while Alan Bellringer has traced the novel's recurring emphasis on stunted growth and frustrated love.
The book is now read as one of Eliot's most directly personal novels, its portrait of a clever girl outgrowing the narrow options available to her drawing visibly on Eliot's own life. It has been adapted for television several times, including a 1997 production that used the Bintry watermill to stand in for Dorlcote Mill, and it remains a fixture of university courses on the nineteenth century novel.